OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Inventions on Using Colors in Graphical User Interfaces
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2014
Year: 2014

Color is an important aspect of any graphical user interface (GUI). Color is used to make a GUI attractive and meaningful. But there are difficulties in using colors too. Improper use of color can result in adverse effects. Wrong colors at wrong place can make the GUI look clumsy and confusing. Apart from the aesthetics issues there are many other issues involved with colors too. One of the contradictions relating to usage of color is "The color of the GUI should be customizable to suit user preference. But at the same time it should not be customizable, as that would cause annoyance and confusion to other users." Another contraction relating to using color is "The user should be displayed all 16 million colors to select the desired color precisely, But from another angle the user should not be displayed all 16 million colors as that would create confusion and difficulty in selection." This article analyses some inventions selected from US Patent database and illustrates how the inventors have been able to solve various contradictions relating to usage of colors in Graphical User Interface.
Inventions on selecting GUI elements
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2014
Year: 2014

Selecting an object or element is a fundamental operation in any graphic user interface. It is necessary to select an object before doing any operation (such as, dragging, copying, opening, deleting etc.) on that object. The GUI may provide features to select any single object or even multiple objects. The feature of selecting multiple objects can provides tremendous power to the GUI as the user can do complex operations on multiple objects in one go. However, the process of selection is not as simple as it appears to the user of a GUI. The internal logic of a selection mechanism can be very complex in some situations. The article describes some fundamental difficulties associated with the selection mechanism, and illustrates the solutions provided by different inventions selected from US patent database.
Model-free quantification of time-series predictability
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2014
Year: 2014

This paper provides insight into when, why, and how forecast strategies fail when they are applied to complicated time series. We conjecture that the inherent complexity of real-world time-series data---which results from the dimension, nonlinearity, and non-stationarity of the generating process, as well as from measurement issues like noise, aggregation, and finite data length---is both empirically quantifiable and directly correlated with predictability. In particular, we argue that redundancy is an effective way to measure complexity and predictive structure in an experimental time series and that weighted permutation entropy is an effective way to estimate that redundancy. To validate these conjectures, we study 120 different time-series data sets. For each time series, we construct predictions using a wide variety of forecast models, then compare the accuracy of the predictions with the permutation entropy of that time series. We use the results to develop a model-free heuristic that can help practitioners recognize when a particular prediction method is not well matched to the task at hand: that is, when the time series has more predictive structure than that method can capture and exploit.
Evaluating the Assessment of Software Fault-Freeness
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2014
Year: 2014

We propose to validate experimentally a theory of software certification that proceeds from assessment of confidence in fault-freeness (due to standards) to conservative prediction of failure-free operation.
Credulous and Skeptical Argument Games for Complete Semantics in Conflict Resolution based Argumentation
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2014
Year: 2014

Argumentation is one of the most popular approaches of defining a~non-monotonic formalism and several argumentation based semantics were proposed for defeasible logic programs. Recently, a new approach based on notions of conflict resolutions was proposed, however with declarative semantics only. This paper gives a more procedural counterpart by developing skeptical and credulous argument games for complete semantics and soundness and completeness theorems for both games are provided. After that, distribution of defeasible logic program into several contexts is investigated and both argument games are adapted for multi-context system.
Fast Synchronization of Random Automata
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2014
Year: 2014

A synchronizing word for an automaton is a word that brings that automaton into one and the same state, regardless of the starting position. Cerny conjectured in 1964 that if a n-state deterministic automaton has a synchronizing word, then it has a synchronizing word of size at most (n-1)^2. Berlinkov recently made a breakthrough in the probabilistic analysis of synchronization by proving that with high probability, an automaton has a synchronizing word. In this article, we prove that with high probability an automaton admits a synchronizing word of length smaller than n^(1+ε), and therefore that the Cerny conjecture holds with high probability.
Heuristic rating estimation - geometric approach
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2014
Year: 2014

Heuristic Rating Estimation (HRE) is a newly proposed method supporting decisions analysis based on the use of pairwise comparisons. It allows that the ranking values of some alternatives (herein referred to as concepts) are initially known, whilst the ranks for the other concepts have yet to be estimated. To calculate the missing ranks it is assumed that the priority of every single concept can be determined as the weighted arithmetic mean of priorities of all the other concepts. It has been shown that the problem has admissible solution if the inconsistency of pairwise comparisons is not too high. The proposed approach adopts the heuristics according to which to determine the missing priorities a weighted geometric mean is used. In this approach, despite an increased complexity, the solution always exists and their existence does not depend on the inconsistency of the input matrix. Thus, the presented approach might be appropriate for a larger number of problems than the previous method. The formal definition of the proposed geometric heuristics is accompanied by two numerical examples.
Computable real function F such that F is not polynomial time computable on [0,1]
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2014
Year: 2014

A computable real function F on [0,1] is constructed such that there exists an exponential time algorithm for the evaluation of the function on [0,1] on Turing machine but there does not exist any polynomial time algorithm for the evaluation of the function on [0,1] on Turing machine (moreover, it holds for any rational point on (0,1))
Secure Coordination with a Two-Sided Helper
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2014
Year: 2014

We investigate the problem of secure source coding with a two-sided helper in a game-theoretic framework. Alice (A) and Helen (H) view iid correlated information sequences $X^n$ and $Y^n$ respectively. Alice communicates to Bob (B) at rate $R$, while H broadcasts a message to both A and B at rate $R_H$. Additionally, A and B share secret key $K$ at rate $R_0$ that is independent of $(X^n,Y^n)$. An active adversary, Eve (E) sees all communication links while having access to a (possibly degraded) version of the past information. We characterize the rate-payoff region for this problem. We also solve the problem when the link from A to B is private. Our work recovers previous results of Schieler-Cuff and Kittichokechai et al.
Computer vision-based recognition of liquid surfaces and phase boundaries in transparent vessels, with emphasis on chemistry applications
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2014
Year: 2014

The ability to recognize the liquid surface and the liquid level in transparent containers is perhaps the most commonly used evaluation method when dealing with fluids. Such recognition is essential in determining the liquid volume, fill level, phase boundaries and phase separation in various fluid systems. The recognition of liquid surfaces is particularly important in solution chemistry, where it is essential to many laboratory techniques (e.g., extraction, distillation, titration). A general method for the recognition of interfaces between liquid and air or between phase-separating liquids could have a wide range of applications and contribute to the understanding of the visual properties of such interfaces. This work examines a computer vision method for the recognition of liquid surfaces and liquid levels in various transparent containers. The method can be applied to recognition of both liquid-air and liquid-liquid surfaces. No prior knowledge of the number of phases is required. The method receives the image of the liquid container and the boundaries of the container in the image and scans all possible curves that could correspond to the outlines of liquid surfaces in the image. The method then compares each curve to the image to rate its correspondence with the outline of the real liquid surface by examining various image properties in the area surrounding each point of the curve. The image properties that were found to give the best indication of the liquid surface are the relative intensity change, the edge density change and the gradient direction relative to the curve normal.
SReach: A Bounded Model Checker for Stochastic Hybrid Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2014
Year: 2014

In this paper we describe a new tool, SReach, which solves probabilistic bounded reachability problems for two classes of stochastic hybrid systems. The first one is (nonlinear) hybrid automata with parametric uncertainty. The second one is probabilistic hybrid automata with additional randomness for both transition probabilities and variable resets. Standard approaches to reachability problems for linear hybrid systems require numerical solutions for large optimization problems, and become infeasible for systems involving both nonlinear dynamics over the reals and stochasticity. Our approach encodes stochastic information by using random variables, and combines the randomized sampling, a $δ$-complete decision procedure, and statistical tests. SReach utilizes the $δ$-complete decision procedure to solve reachability problems in a sound manner, i.e., it always decides correctly if, for a given assignment to all random variables, the system actually reaches the unsafe region. The statistical tests adapted guarantee arbitrary small error bounds between probabilities estimated by SReach and real ones. Compared to standard simulation-based methods, our approach supports non-deterministic branching, increases the coverage of simulation, and avoids the zero-crossing problem. We demonstrate our method's feasibility by applying SReach to three representative biological models and to additional benchmarks for nonlinear hybrid systems with multiple probabilistic system parameters.
Contracting Experts With Unknown Cost Structures
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2014
Year: 2014

We investigate the problem of a principal looking to contract an expert to provide a probability forecast for a categorical event. We assume all experts have a common public prior on the event's probability, but can form more accurate opinions by engaging in research. Various experts' research costs are unknown to the principal. We present a truthful and efficient mechanism for the principal's problem of contracting an expert. This results in the principal contracting the best expert to do the work, and the principal's expected utility is equivalent to having the second best expert in-house. Our mechanism connects scoring rules with auctions, a connection that is useful when obtaining new information requires costly research.
Do we really need to write documentation for a system? CASE tool add-ons: generator+editor for a precise documentation
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2014
Year: 2014

One of the common problems of system development projects is that the system documentation is often outdated and does not describe the latest version of the system. The situation is even more complicated if we are speaking not about a natural language description of the system, but about its formal specification. In this paper we discuss how the problem could be solved by updating the documentation automatically, by generating a new formal specification from the model if the model is frequently changed.
A Deep Architecture for Semantic Parsing
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2014
Year: 2014

Many successful approaches to semantic parsing build on top of the syntactic analysis of text, and make use of distributional representations or statistical models to match parses to ontology-specific queries. This paper presents a novel deep learning architecture which provides a semantic parsing system through the union of two neural models of language semantics. It allows for the generation of ontology-specific queries from natural language statements and questions without the need for parsing, which makes it especially suitable to grammatically malformed or syntactically atypical text, such as tweets, as well as permitting the development of semantic parsers for resource-poor languages.
Zero Energy Network stack for Energy Harvested WSNs
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2014
Year: 2014

We present our ``Zero Energy Network'' (ZEN) protocol stack for energy harvesting wireless sensor networks applications. The novelty in our work is $4$ fold: (1) Energy harvesting aware fully featured MAC layer. Carrier sensing, Backoff algorithms, ARQ, RTS/CTS mechanisms, Adaptive Duty Cycling are either auto configurable or available as tunable parameters to match the available energy (b) Energy harvesting aware Routing Protocol. The multi-hop network establishes routes to the base station using a modified version of AODVjr routing protocol assisted by energy predictions. (c) Application of a time series called ``Holt-Winters'' for predicting the incoming energy. (d) A distributed smart application running over the ZEN stack which utilizes a multi parameter optimized perturbation technique to optimally use the available energy. The application is capable of programming the ZEN stack in an energy efficient manner. The energy harvested distributed smart application runs on a realistic solar energy trace with a three year seasonality database. We implement a smart application, capable of modifying itself to suit its own as well as the network's energy level. Our analytical results show a close match with the measurements conducted over EHWSN testbed.
Concise comparative summaries (CCS) of large text corpora with a human experiment
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2014
Year: 2014

In this paper we propose a general framework for topic-specific summarization of large text corpora and illustrate how it can be used for the analysis of news databases. Our framework, concise comparative summarization (CCS), is built on sparse classification methods. CCS is a lightweight and flexible tool that offers a compromise between simple word frequency based methods currently in wide use and more heavyweight, model-intensive methods such as latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). We argue that sparse methods have much to offer for text analysis and hope CCS opens the door for a new branch of research in this important field. For a particular topic of interest (e.g., China or energy), CSS automatically labels documents as being either on- or off-topic (usually via keyword search), and then uses sparse classification methods to predict these labels with the high-dimensional counts of all the other words and phrases in the documents. The resulting small set of phrases found as predictive are then harvested as the summary. To validate our tool, we, using news articles from the New York Times international section, designed and conducted a human survey to compare the different summarizers with human understanding. We demonstrate our approach with two case studies, a media analysis of the framing of "Egypt" in the New York Times throughout the Arab Spring and an informal comparison of the New York Times' and Wall Street Journal's coverage of "energy." Overall, we find that the Lasso with $L^2$ normalization can be effectively and usefully used to summarize large corpora, regardless of document size.
Size-Separable Tile Self-Assembly: A Tight Bound for Temperature-1 Mismatch-Free Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2014
Year: 2014

We introduce a new property of tile self-assembly systems that we call size-separability. A system is size-separable if every terminal assembly is a constant factor larger than any intermediate assembly. Size-separability is motivated by the practical problem of filtering completed assemblies from a variety of incomplete "garbage" assemblies using gel electrophoresis or other mass-based filtering techniques. Here we prove that any system without cooperative bonding assembling a unique mismatch-free terminal assembly can be used to construct a size-separable system uniquely assembling the same shape. The proof achieves optimal scale factor and temperature for the size-separable system. As part of the proof, we obtain two results of independent interest on mismatch-free temperature-1 two-handed systems.
Analysis of Dialogical Argumentation via Finite State Machines
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2014
Year: 2014

Dialogical argumentation is an important cognitive activity by which agents exchange arguments and counterarguments as part of some process such as discussion, debate, persuasion and negotiation. Whilst numerous formal systems have been proposed, there is a lack of frameworks for implementing and evaluating these proposals. First-order executable logic has been proposed as a general framework for specifying and analysing dialogical argumentation. In this paper, we investigate how we can implement systems for dialogical argumentation using propositional executable logic. Our approach is to present and evaluate an algorithm that generates a finite state machine that reflects a propositional executable logic specification for a dialogical argumentation together with an initial state. We also consider how the finite state machines can be analysed, with the minimax strategy being used as an illustration of the kinds of empirical analysis that can be undertaken.
The Synchrosqueezing transform for instantaneous spectral analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2014
Year: 2014

The Synchrosqueezing transform is a time-frequency analysis method that can decompose complex signals into time-varying oscillatory components. It is a form of time-frequency reassignment that is both sparse and invertible, allowing for the recovery of the signal. This article presents an overview of the theory and stability properties of Synchrosqueezing, as well as applications of the technique to topics in cardiology, climate science and economics.
Monitoring service quality: methods and solutions to implement a managerial dash-board to improve software development
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2014
Year: 2014

The software used for running and handling the inter-bank network framework provides services with extremely strict uptime (above 99.98 percent) and quality requirements, thus tools to trace and manage changes as well as metrics to measure process quality are essential. Having conducted a two year long campaign of data collection and activity monitoring it has been possible to analyze a huge amount of process data from which many aggregated indicators were derived, selected and evaluated for providing a managerial dash-board to monitor software development.
Near-Optimal Distributed Approximation of Minimum-Weight Connected Dominating Set
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2014
Year: 2014

This paper presents a near-optimal distributed approximation algorithm for the minimum-weight connected dominating set (MCDS) problem. The presented algorithm finds an $O(\log n)$ approximation in $\tilde{O}(D+\sqrt{n})$ rounds, where $D$ is the network diameter and $n$ is the number of nodes. MCDS is a classical NP-hard problem and the achieved approximation factor $O(\log n)$ is known to be optimal up to a constant factor, unless P=NP. Furthermore, the $\tilde{O}(D+\sqrt{n})$ round complexity is known to be optimal modulo logarithmic factors (for any approximation), following [Das Sarma et al.---STOC'11].
Image Compressive Sensing Recovery Using Adaptively Learned Sparsifying Basis via L0 Minimization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2014
Year: 2014

From many fewer acquired measurements than suggested by the Nyquist sampling theory, compressive sensing (CS) theory demonstrates that, a signal can be reconstructed with high probability when it exhibits sparsity in some domain. Most of the conventional CS recovery approaches, however, exploited a set of fixed bases (e.g. DCT, wavelet and gradient domain) for the entirety of a signal, which are irrespective of the non-stationarity of natural signals and cannot achieve high enough degree of sparsity, thus resulting in poor CS recovery performance. In this paper, we propose a new framework for image compressive sensing recovery using adaptively learned sparsifying basis via L0 minimization. The intrinsic sparsity of natural images is enforced substantially by sparsely representing overlapped image patches using the adaptively learned sparsifying basis in the form of L0 norm, greatly reducing blocking artifacts and confining the CS solution space. To make our proposed scheme tractable and robust, a split Bregman iteration based technique is developed to solve the non-convex L0 minimization problem efficiently. Experimental results on a wide range of natural images for CS recovery have shown that our proposed algorithm achieves significant performance improvements over many current state-of-the-art schemes and exhibits good convergence property.
Testing Temporal Connectivity in Sparse Dynamic Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2014
Year: 2014

We address the problem of testing whether a given dynamic graph is temporally connected, {\it i.e} a temporal path (also called a {\em journey}) exists between all pairs of vertices. We consider a discrete version of the problem, where the topology is given as an evolving graph ${\cal G}=\{G_1,G_2,...,G_{k}\}$ whose set of vertices is invariant and the set of (directed) edges varies over time. Two cases are studied, depending on whether a single edge or an unlimited number of edges can be crossed in a same $G_i$ (strict journeys {\it vs} non-strict journeys). In the case of {\em strict} journeys, a number of existing algorithms designed for more general problems can be adapted. We adapt one of them to the above formulation of the problem and characterize its running time complexity. The parameters of interest are the length of the graph sequence $k=|{\cal G}|$, the maximum {\em instant} density $μ=max(|E_i|)$, and the {\em cumulated} density $m=|\cup E_i|$. Our algorithm has a time complexity of $O(kμn)$, where $n$ is the number of nodes. This complexity is compared to that of the other solutions: one is always more costly (keep in mind that is solves a more general problem), the other one is more or less costly depending on the interplay between instant density and cumulated density. The length $k$ of the sequence also plays a role. We characterize the key values of $k, μ$ and $m$ for which either algorithm should be used. In the case of {\em non-strict} journeys, for which no algorithm is known, we show that some pre-processing of the input graph allows us to re-use the same algorithm than before. By chance, these operations happens to cost again $O(kμn)$ time, which implies that the second problem is not more difficult than the first.
Analysis-by-Synthesis-based Quantization of Compressed Sensing Measurements
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2014
Year: 2014

We consider a resource-constrained scenario where a compressed sensing- (CS) based sensor has a low number of measurements which are quantized at a low rate followed by transmission or storage. Applying this scenario, we develop a new quantizer design which aims to attain a high-quality reconstruction performance of a sparse source signal based on analysis-by-synthesis framework. Through simulations, we compare the performance of the proposed quantization algorithm vis-a-vis existing quantization methods.